Amazon.com Top 100 Books of the Millenium

Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student in
1964 and encountered a tribe of full-grown
women wearing puffed sleeves, clutching teddies
and babbling excitedly about the doings of
hobbits, it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would
turn out to be the most influential writer of
the twentieth century. The bad dream has materialised.
-Germaine Greer

I believe the Lord of the Rings to be the greatest fiction of
the 20th Century and perhaps the greatest of all time. The failure
to include it on the Modern Library Top 100
is completely inexplicable. Happily, the Amazon
Top 100, which was voted on by actual readers, put it at number one.
Allow me to offer the reasons, both objective and personal, why I think
that is it's rightful place on any list.

When we speak of authors as gods, or more likely they speak of themselves
as such, there is of course an element of hyperbole, but it accompanies
a kernel of truth. Within the boundaries of their fiction, authors
are in fact Creators and wield godlike powers. They define reality,
control events, decide who lives and who dies. The best of them create
characters and situations that the reader genuinely cares about and a very
few of them, the best of the best, create characters and situations which
seem to exist beyond the bounds of the story. To take an easy example,
there is Sherlock Holmes. Not only do many people simply assume that
he actually existed, not only did readers demand that he be brought back
from the dead, there is a continual flow of further adventures and prequels
being written all the time. Holmes is so "real" to us that an author
can write about his childhood or his old age and easily carry us along
because in our guts we feel that he enjoyed such phases of life.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a character whom we feel must have had a
past and a future independent of the tales the author left us. This
is truly a remarkable accomplishment.

On the other hand, consider Leopold Bloom from James Joyce's Ulysses
(see Orrin's review). Because
the entire novel is technique and artifice it is impossible to imagine
a Bloom who exists outside of the author's head. He has no past or
future because Joyce didn't write them. This in itself does not make
Ulysses
a bad book--there are plenty of other reasons that it is a bad book.
It is certainly possible to create a great book or a great protagonist
within these bounds. Holden Caufield, for instance, is a great character
and Catcher in the Rye a great book (see Orrin's
review), but he is unimaginable as an adult. Though memorable
and sympathetic, his existence is intrinsically enmeshed within this particular
novel.

All of which is by way of introduction to what is perhaps the greatest
feat of creative imagination in all of literature, Tolkien's Lord of
the Rings. Tolkien created not merely one or two characters who
seem to have an external existence, he created an entire world, several
races, entire languages, mythologies, songs, poetry, and so on, until finally
it comes to seem that he is merely the historian of a separate world, rather
than it's Creator. The thoroughness with which he realizes his unique
vision gives to his fiction a texture and a substance which may never be
equaled. He was able to achieve this remarkable effect in large part
by spending years working on the background elements of his story before
ever turning his attention to the main narrative thread. For example,
dwarves are a common enough staple of fantasy and fairy tales, but because
Tolkien had spent years developing a dwarvish language and writing a history
of the dwarves and imagining a dwarvish mythology, when we come upon a
dwarf in Middle Earth, he seems not to be a convenient imaginary figure
but an actual being with his own life story, racial history and tongue.
This is likewise true for the elves, the hobbits, even the orcs--a pretty
amazing achievement.

All of this would suffice to rank these books among the world's greatest,
even if he just put the characters through some fairly pedestrian paces,
just some standard quest or adventure. But Tolkien's has a much higher
ambition here. His religious influences and aims are well understood
and I'll not dwell on them here. I'm more interested in the way the
stories function as democratic myth. The great tension in the series
is not truly between good and evil, rather it derives from the capacity
of power to corrupt good people. Elves and men and dwarves and even
Gandalf must all struggle, some successfully, some not, against the temptation
to take the ring of power themselves. Each is able to imagine that
committing acts of short term evil will allow them to act for what they
perceive as the greater good. But in fact it is only the lowly hobbits,
Sam and Frodo, with no aspirations towards greatness, who can wield power
selflessly and even they ultimately require divine intervention to finally
destroy the ring. This political understanding further elevates the
series and provides it with a message that resonates with our experience,
particularly in the 20th Century. The various races who are tempted
by the ring resemble New Dealers and Bolsheviks and Maoists, each of them
thinking that they are uniquely capable of using power toward good ends,
failing to perceive that the seductive qualities of power itself is warping
their souls. In the end, in Middle Earth as on Earth, only the humble
folk should be trusted with power and even they bear watching.

Finally, to my subjective reasons. If my Mom is to be believed,
and I think we can trust her on this one, it was around 5th grade that
I really became a reader. As I recall, my teacher Mrs. Deakens got
me going on books about explorers. Like any young boy I was captivated
by such tales of adventure. I devoured comic books swashbucklers
and science fiction. I read every Doc Savage I could get my hands
on, Tarzan (see Orrin's review),
John Carter of Mars, Conan, and any other pulp fiction I could find.
Meanwhile, our neighbor, Mark Farris, read the same books over and over
again in an unending cycle--the Chronicles of Narnia (see Orrin's
review) straight through, then the Lord of the Rings from start
to finish and back to Narnia--and he swore by them. Now the Narnia
books weren't too daunting. each one is pretty slender, so I managed them.
But the Lord of the Rings offers quite an imposing structure to
the kid who contemplates reading it. Taken together the four books
are what? maybe 1700 or so pages? Well, of course I did eventually
screw up my courage and tackle this daunting task and not only was I ensorceled
by the story, but having finished I was naturally inordinately proud of
myself. Add that sense of self satisfaction into the mix and I'd
imagine that for most kids who read the series at a certain age it inevitably
becomes their favorite. In fact, I'd like to get these kids who are
so enraptured by the Harry Potter books (see Orrin's
review) and make sure that they continue on through C.S. Lewis and
on to Tolkien. The Potter books are fun; Tolkien is sublime.

Comments:

Also just so you know, LOTR came out in 1954 (FOTR and TTT) and 1955 (TROTK). Where you got this 1948 date is beyond me.

- Gene Ray

- Jan-12-2007, 09:58

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"Because the entire novel is technique and artifice it is impossible to imagine a Bloom who exists outside of the author's head. He has no past or future because Joyce didn't write them."

I do not worship James Joyce, his writing style, or "Ulysses," but the *fact* of the matter is, regardless of whatever you think of these things, there is *extensive* backstory in "Ulysses."

Because I don't like spouting negative slop on the Internet, I'll say something nice: "Lord Of The Rings" is good, and Tolkien's imagination is stunning and massively influential, though each individual book has a slow time getting started.

- Gene Ray

- Dec-04-2006, 21:20

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oh yeah.. and with what authority do you judge ulysses again? seems to me you never actually finished reading it. i suppose, however, that it does make you look exceptionally dashing and intelligent to include it in your little essay. cripes, man. who the hell writes comparitively between a work of tolkein's and one of joyce's? especially when he's never finished reading the latter?